Does anyone think David Frum's timing in dropping this apologist nonsense about uncanceling Woodrow Wilson is an accident? He claims it's in honor of the 100th anniversary of Wilson's death and that,

Despised as a racist by today’s left and a tyrant by today’s right, the 28th president championed a set of values that our politics sorely lack.

Such as? Wilson exemplified racist divisiveness, authoritarianism, and sectarianism. All the things that Frum claims exist in former president Donald J. Trump. "Orange Man Bad" lives rent-free in Frum's head, and he is the watchman on the wall warning that should Trump once again attain the presidency, dark days are ahead. Frum peddles his garbage hot takes, Russian delusion and all, on MSNBC, The Atlantic, and any other outlet that gives his fever dreams a platform. Here's another recent Frum piece that screams Chicken Little:

If Trump wins the presidency again, the whole world will become a theater for his politics of revenge and reward. Ukraine will be abandoned to Vladimir Putin; Saudi Arabia will collect its dividends for its investments in the Trump family.

Frum cannot stomach Trump, but he took over 4,000 words to laud Woodrow Wilson, a president with a proven track record of all of these behaviors, and the policies he enacted that embedded many of them federally. Frum has nothing but love for Wilson, claiming he is just a victim of the times and extremism on the Left and the Right.  

Uncancel Woodrow Wilson, my latest in @theAtlantic https://t.co/MMw1vskPAR

— David Frum (@davidfrum) February 4, 2024

Does David Frum realize that Wilson verifiably was all the things he unsubstantially accuses Trump of? Or has this - like most things - sailed right over his pointy head?

— Alaskan Tequila (@LTequila4) February 4, 2024

Frum dropped this article over this weekend, the first one in February, and the launch of Black History Month. The disconnect with these self-proclaimed true conservatives is stunning.

Next Saturday, February 3, marks 100 years since the death of President Woodrow Wilson. No US president has suffered such a calamitous collapse in reputation from peak to now. In the issue of the Atlantic that ships Monday, I argue the case for uncancelling Wilson.

— David Frum (@davidfrum) January 27, 2024

Frum, like a lot of these elitists, apparently just assumes Black people are stupid. CEO, entrepreneur, Radio producer, and writer Darvio Morrow said it well:

Woodrow Wilson was one of the most racist presidents ever elected. He was a Eugenicist. He segregated the military. He screened the Klan propaganda movie “Birth of a Nation” IN THE WHITE HOUSE and helped sparked the revival of the KKK. Also remember that David Frum is the poster… https://t.co/jUMXpq2a17

— Darvio Morrow (@DTheKingpin) January 28, 2024

Woodrow Wilson was one of the most racist presidents ever elected. He was a Eugenicist. He segregated the military. He screened the Klan propaganda movie “Birth of a Nation” IN THE WHITE HOUSE and helped sparked the revival of the KKK. Also remember that David Frum is the poster child for the old Republican establishment. The same establishment that wants to re-take power in the GOP now. Whitewashing a progressive racist without giving a single damn about his abhorrent record with Black people is pretty much on brand.

Frum laid out his apologist diatribe, pointing out how everyone from liberal writer Adam Hochschild to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has been detrimentally critical of Wilson and helped to diminish his legacy. I surmise Wilson did that on his own, but Frum is more enraptured with the concept of resurrecting a racist than he is with viewing history through the long lens of reality. Wilson's racism was egregious in the early 20th Century, and it is even more egregious now in the light of the Civil Rights movement and our nation's efforts to right the destructiveness and injustice of the systemic racism that plagued it from its founding. Frum wades through 10 paragraphs before he even deigns to mention Wilson's unapologetic bigotry.

Wilson’s bigotries were very real. As a historian, he made the case that freedmen had too hastily been given the franchise following the Civil War. All his life, he accepted a subordinate status for Black Americans. As a politician, he enforced and extended it. In private, he told demeaning jokes in imitated dialect and delighted in minstrel shows. He was said to have praised D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation—originally titled The Clansman—as “like writing history with lightning,” though this at least is almost certainly untrue: Wilson viewed the movie in silence, according to a witness at the time. He may have been annoyed because an inter-title within the movie quoted Wilson’s A History of the American People as seeming to praise the Ku Klux Klan. The relevant section had in fact rebuked the Klan for its lawless violence. But Wilson objected only to the Klan’s means, not its ends. He wholeheartedly endorsed the extinguishing of Reconstruction-era reforms by state legislatures and white-dominated courts.

You don't need to be heard giving praise to this horrific propaganda film, which cemented lies, falsehoods, and stereotypes of American Blacks into the nation's conscience. The fact that a president chose to do a premiere screening of the film at the White House clearly expresses allegiance and seal of approval, and Wilson fully knew this. 

And Frum won’t get canceled for celebrating one of the most racist presidents in USA history. pic.twitter.com/81aW4PgIQM

— Dr. Interracial 🇺🇸 (@billysandytodd) January 28, 2024

Wilson's own biographer pegged him as a particular breed of racist. One that basically smiled in the face of Blacks and made promises about "progress" while stabbing them in the back. Not unlike the Democrat Party and the progressive Left, as well as Frum and some of his fellow Never Trump and Lincoln Project travelers.  

In his biography, Berg suggests that Wilson suffered from  “genteel racism,” a prejudice that couldn’t stomach the idea of racial equality or inappropriate behavior in the pursuit of white supremacy.

Cooper, in his biography, puts it this way: “Violence, lynching and virulent racism ... grieved him.”  But when it came to lynching, he “deplored the passion, disorder, and sullied international image of white Americans rather than injury, horror and death of black Americans.”

In 2015, a colleague of Frum's penned one of the most glaring examples of Wilson's "genteel racism." In 1913, Wilson kicked a well-known civil rights leader out of the Oval Office. 

As president, Wilson oversaw unprecedented segregation in federal offices. It’s a shameful side to his legacy that came to a head one fall afternoon in 1914 when he threw the civil-rights leader William Monroe Trotter out of the Oval Office. 

[...]

In the next year, segregation did not improve; it worsened. By this time, numerous instances of workplace separation became well publicized. Among them, separate toilets in the U.S. Treasury and the Interior Department, a practice that Wilson’s Treasury secretary, William G. McAdoo, defended: “I am not going to argue the justification of the separate toilets orders, beyond saying that it is difficult to disregard certain feelings and sentiments of white people in a matter of this sort.”

Trotter tried to gain a follow-up meeting with Wilson, and Wilson blew him off. Sound familiar? Once Trotter gained a second audience with Wilson and bluntly confronted him on his policies, Wilson showed his true colors.

Trotter had accused the president of lying by saying that race prejudice was the sole motivation for Jim Crow and that to assert otherwise, to claim his administration sought to protect blacks from “friction,” was ridiculous. “We are sorely disappointed that you take the position that the separation itself is not wrong, is not injurious, is not rightly offensive to you,” Trotter said.

Wilson interrupted Trotter: “Your tone, sir, offends me.” To the entire delegation, he said, “I want to say that if this association comes again, it must have another spokesman,” declaring no one had ever come into his office and insulted him as Trotter had. “You have spoiled the whole cause for which you came,” he told The Guardian editor dismissively.

Trotter rightly pointed out that it was Blacks who supported Wilson at the polls and helped to get him elected. For which Wilson became even more angry and ended the meeting, kicking the entire delegation out. Smart newsman that he was, Trotter documented the meeting for the press, including Wilson's outburst. The embarrassing incident went viral, and Wilson was shown for who he truly was. Now, Frum is trying to paint a different picture and justify Wilson's bigotry by asserting that other presidents who preceded and followed Wilson were cut from the same cloth. That's akin to saying the sky is blue and water is wet. 

Wilson’s bigotries were shared by his predecessors and immediate successors in the presidency. In his 1909 inaugural address, William Howard Taft repudiated equal voting rights for Black Americans and justified the exclusion of immigrants from China. Taft’s predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, enthusiastically promoted the pseudoscience of racial hierarchy that placed white Europeans at the top. The segregation of the federal civil service that Wilson’s administration instituted was maintained by the four presidents who followed him: Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and FDR.

He is the Father of the American Progressive movement... they want us to forget history. We will NOT https://t.co/FLVKKLkZQH

— Sonnie Johnson (@SonnieJohnson) January 28, 2024

Wilson's predecessors and successors, notwithstanding, The hallmark of Wilson's presidency is that his own personal racism became the cornerstone of national policy throughout his administration. Policies that had to be undone with amendments and repeals decades later. Frum also mentions Franklin Delano Roosevelt as an example. Much like Wilson, the 32nd President allowed his personal prejudice to justify disenfranchising Japanese American citizens, robbing them of their land and businesses, and placing them in internment camps. The question here is why hasn't FDR's legacy also been diminished due to this horrific stripping of Asian American's constitutional rights? Frum doesn't realize that this is not the flex he thinks it is.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Wilson must be brought low because he stood so high. He is scorned now because of our weakening attachment to what was formerly regarded as good and great.

He had critics then, too, that he jailed.

So it's not revisionist history to dislike this man. https://t.co/PyoDzarZC7

— Mrs.Pinky 🇺🇸 Iconic Marriage Coach (@MRSpinkston85) January 28, 2024

Frum concludes his tortured missive.

Modern America owes just such an obligation to Wilson. He showed the way to the modern world. He did not reach his hoped-for destination, but neither yet have we. Cancel Wilson, and you empower those who seek to discredit the high goals for which he worked. Those are goals still worth working toward. To realize them, supporters of American global leadership cannot dispense with the practical and moral legacy of Woodrow Wilson.

Frum is a global elitist who has spent way too much time in think tanks and very little time with actual Americans, especially Black ones. Otherwise, he would not have bothered to pen this hot garbage trying to paint a radical racist and horrible president as some kind of global leader who sought to show us the way to a better world. Wilson's "practical and moral legacy" is one of attempted control and diminishment of people whom he deemed unfit for his perfect society. It never has and never will make for a better world, which is why Wilson's so-called legacy disintegrated.